Marilyn Hacker Quotes

• You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don’t mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.

  Marilyn Hacker

• When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

  Marilyn Hacker

• We sometimes received – and I would read – 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

  Marilyn Hacker

• Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I’m writing myself, but equally closely technically.

  Marilyn Hacker

• Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I’ve found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

  Marilyn Hacker

• There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

  Marilyn Hacker

• There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students’ use of the vocabulary they’re acquiring.

  Marilyn Hacker

• The woman poet must be either a s*xless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

  Marilyn Hacker

• The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

  Marilyn Hacker

• The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It’s not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it’s an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

  Marilyn Hacker

• The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn’t exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

  Marilyn Hacker

• The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

  Marilyn Hacker

• Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise – nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

  Marilyn Hacker

• Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

  Marilyn Hacker

• Paris is a wonderful city. I can’t say I belong to an especially anglophone community.

  Marilyn Hacker

• Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

  Marilyn Hacker

• My mother was told she couldn’t go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.

  Marilyn Hacker

• I’ve been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You’re sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you’ve read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

  Marilyn Hacker

• I’m addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things – being able to buy a book on the internet that you can’t find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.

  Marilyn Hacker

• I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

  Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker (35)

Birth:	27th November, 1942
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Poet

Related Authors

• William Scott Ritter Jr.
• Forrest Gander
• Stephen Bayley
• V. S. Pritchett
• August Wilhelm
• Brooks Atkinson
• Robert Hughes
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Tom Kenny
• James Laver

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 19th May

Births

• 1991 - Jordan Pruitt
• 1944 - Lynn Barber
• 1941 - Nora Ephron
• 1959 - Nicole Brown Simpson
• 1881 - Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

Deaths

• 2012 - Warren Rudman
• 1939 - Karl Radek
• 1991 - Muriel Box
• 1935 - T. E. Lawrence
• 1795 - Portrait of James Boswell